Thursday, May 29, 2008

KidsWealth

One of the things we picked up at this weekend's FPEA home schooling convention is a pair of KidsWealth packages. KidsWealth is sort of like Rich Dad, Poor Dad or Cashflow for Kids, but it works off of the real money of your kids regular allowance. Kids use an envelope system to allocate their monthly pay into different categories, including Wealth, which puts their money to work earning at least savings account interest, and Angel, where they donate to charitable causes.

I'll have to check back in with an update in a few months to see how the kids do with the program. We debated it, but got a kit for each kid, even though our youngest is only 4. But I've even joked that he should start a retirement savings account now.

On a marketing front, the whole package and website are very slickly done. The graphics looked so much like Hot Shot Business from Disney/the Kauffman Foundation that I thought they had a tie-in, but they don't. KidsWealth quite possibly had the best graphic design of the whole show. Their booth had slick graphics too, but there was surprisingly little energy to it. Just two piles of their shrink-wrapped boxes and an open sample or two. It would have been good at a trade show or a business expo, but at a consumer-level event like that, they needed more of a hook to draw in parent educators. Money quizzes and games, especially for kids, would have helped a lot.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Detour Water Night

Tonight was the last night of Detour. For the third year in a row, we ended with Water Night. Water slides, soapy slip-n-slides, sprinklers, squirt guns, etc. This year we had the addition of a fire engine, thanks to Michael Kelzer and Oldsmar Fire Rescue. He sprayed 2500 gallons of water on the kids. Well, kids and adults. I think between me and Julie, we caught at least 500 gallons. "Did you feel like a big rain cloud was following you all night?" He also sprayed the kids down with foam (baby shampoo).

No major issues. A couple girls that didn't meet the "no two piece suits or bikinis" rule. A couple bumped knees and heads, especially on the slip-n-slide. Someone apparently took the wrong shoes home and lost-n-found gained a half-dozen pairs of shoes, some towels, and some assorted clothing. A few families showed up not expecting Water Night, but we've been promoting it for weeks through almost every channel we had available. Even the little kids seemed to handle the night well. Lots of extra volunteers helped out, which made it run as smoothly as it's ever run.

Thanks to everyone involved. I really need to do at least one wrapup post for the year or the last two years, to review what did and didn't work as we tried different takes on children's ministry workshop rotations.